Solid – Reshape the web as we know it

I'm not convinced it's worth investing time or effort into something that might make it harder to address the problem of URLs in the future. I get "solve one problem at a time", but I feel like URLs are so fundamental of a problem, you have to get them right first before you move on to other problems. And for the most part, we have gotten them right -- build whatever web replacement you're working on on top of DAT/IPFS, unless you have a really good reason not to :)

A decentralized web is a web where content can be re-hosted and verified by anyone.

it adds absolutely nothing besides that.

This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base).

And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten.

You have to burn books/libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things!

And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom I want to have.

Things like block-chain/graphs combined with content adressability bring significant limitations to FREEDOM. Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living.

And on:

> You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.

Yes you can, if you kill someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)

This is important, because getting rid of a content-addressable strategy doesn't actually protect your data. In practice, running application logic locally and having small private swarms is better for privacy than what we have on the web right now.

So say you're hosting your own data at a traditional URL and on IPFS. Well, if someone wants to save your data, they can do it with the same ease on both. They just download your stuff and save it. If you take your data down from IPFS and from the traditional URL before someone saves it, then your data is safe. So, again, same situation.

What IPFS says is, "if someone re-hosts your data, can we cryptographically prove that it's the same data? And can we refer to the data by that signature rather than whatever the host is this week?" So, if your data goes down but someone else found it and rehosted it, stuff like URLs would still work (although in practice, the URL you'd use would be a pointer to the most recent version of your site, so even that isn't necessarily typical).

This is a minor loss to data ownership because you can't literally invalidate a URL if other people are willing to host it. But that's the only thing you've lost. Under the web as it exists today, someone can still take all of your images and rehost them on Reddit or something. If you think it's easy to prevent that, go let the MPAA know what your strategy is so they can end piracy forever.

So the problem with IPFS/DAT isn't fundamentally any different, it just means that URLs break less often, there are fewer Man-in-the-Middle attacks on your website, and there are fewer download links that lie about their payloads.